Profy

Now that we are getting ready to dive into tons of news and reports from the floors at Macworld in San Francisco and Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, one is very likely to bump into a number of blog posts and articles complaining about the obvious downsizing of the two favorite tech shows that traditionally open the year for many technology professionals. And while the downscaling is obvious, I guess there is nothing particularly wrong about it - the entire industry is coming to its senses after a long period of exuberance and it should only be admired, I think.

So yes, we will see the events that will be somewhat smaller than we have come to expect from the two major players opening up the year in early January...

Earlier today we have finally received the confirmation that Steve Jobs did have health problems and these health problems are the reason (or at least one of the reasons) for him not to make his traditional keynote at Macworld. But instead of listening to what Mr. Jobs wanted us to hear and what the Board of Directors confirmed, the tech blogosphere instead engaged in a new round of rumors about how bad his health is and when we should expect him to leave the position of Apple CEO...

China is well-known for its strict approach to dealing with websites, blocking everything that the country's government does not consider to be appropriate for the eyes of its citizens and demanding websites to comply if they want to remain in the huge Chinese internet market. But today's news is even more extravagant than usually as Chinese officials target the largest websites, including the most popular search engines in the country - the local leader Baidu and Google...

We often hear complains here and there about the connections between social networks and our real lives and sometimes we even see what looks like real family conflicts with husbands and wives remaining unconnected on Facebook, even when they both have accounts. But now we are facing a new issue of the growing disappointment of a certain portion of Facebook users over having to be on the same network with another portion of users, those happen to be much older...

Of course now that the major question for many online companies is that of monetizing the resources they have, we will see new innovative approaches to making money off traffic and users everywhere. The recent example that definitely deserves noting as it offers a direct road to the bright future for quite a number of our favorite web projects is that of Reddit, the social news website.

Reddit is well-known for its intellectual audience that is usually supposed to be more grown-up than that of Digg - hence one can often find stories here that will be more thought-provoking that anything one can ever see on Digg...

Net Applications statistics tracking service has reported the December figures for use of internet browsers and the data looks to be very sad for Microsoft's Internet Explorer as it is losing its market share to all its major competitors - Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and the latest arrival - Google's Chrome.

To be more specific, in December Internet Explorer lost a total of 1.6 percentage points and ended the month owning 68.2% of the market which is a drastic 10.4% decline in its share since December, 2007...

Of course it is quite difficult to argue that 2008 has been a very challenging year for many, especially with the global financial crisis bursting out later in the year. Many of us have been affected, some actually hit heavily - people working in many industries have been damaged to a certain extent and internet is no exception.

And of course it is pretty difficult to hope that the simple fact that we are entering the New Year, the year 2009, in a few hours will actually mean that the crisis will somehow be resolved and the situation will at least begin to normalize...

We have spoken already about how women tend to make more New Year's resolutions but are less willing to keep them and one comment on that post suggested a few things about making a New Year's resolution and actually keeping it. The most obvious tip is to make the resolution public as if you have people observing your progress (or lack of it) it will likely to be a good incentive for you to keep the promise. So I have decided to collect a few places online where a person can share the New Year's resolutions to get some public support and feel responsibility to live up to the obligations...

Now that the year 2009 is mere hours ahead I wanted to draw your attention to a new project launched yesterday trying to really make a difference. The name is The Hush Project and the idea is "to get web workers on board and help change the lives of people that change lives, but do not get the credit they deserve".

So basically it is a charitable project that is intended to help everyone notice people trying to change this world without drawing attention from their efforts to those behind the sites promoting these efforts...